Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday June 27, 2014 @11:21AM
from the minority-report-but-for-hospitals dept.

An anonymous reader writes Google often gets criticism for its seemingly boundless desire for data collection and analysis, but the company says it has higher ambitions than just figuring out how best to serve advertising. Speaking to the NY Times, Larry Page said, "We get so worried about these things that we don't get the benefits Right now we don't data-mine healthcare data. If we did we'd probably save 100,000 lives next year." By "these things," he means privacy concerns and fear that the data might be misused. But he also pointed to Street View as a case where privacy concerns mostly melted away after people used it and found it helpful. "In the early days of Street View, this was a huge issue, but it's not really a huge issue now. People understand it now and it's very useful. And it doesn't really change your privacy that much. A lot of these things are like that."

In the end, this data will only be used to restrict care by algorithm, saving insurance company profits, at the expense of those lives which were statistically 'inconvenient'. Only with a single payer system could this achieve the ends Mr Page cites. My guess is far more than 100K lives will be lost in persuit of this new profit.

You want to save lives? Then use some of your vast personal fortune to research and discover a cure for cancer, rather than try and convince me that I should give my private information to your company so you can get richer.